Chinese Characters Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land |
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Editor:
| Shah, Angilee Wasserstrom, Jeffrey |
Foreword by:
| Mishra, Pankaj |
ISBN: | 978-0-520-27026-8 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2012 |
Publisher: | University of California Press
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | USD $60.00 |
Book Description:
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An artist paints landscapes of faraway places that she cannot identify in order to find her place in the global economy. A migrant worker sorts recyclables and thinks deeply about the soul of his country, while a Taoist mystic struggles to keep his traditions alive. An entrepreneur capitalizes on a growing car culture by trying to convince people not to buy cars. And a 90-year-old woman remembers how the oldest neighborhoods of her city used to be. These...
More DescriptionAn artist paints landscapes of faraway places that she cannot identify in order to find her place in the global economy. A migrant worker sorts recyclables and thinks deeply about the soul of his country, while a Taoist mystic struggles to keep his traditions alive. An entrepreneur capitalizes on a growing car culture by trying to convince people not to buy cars. And a 90-year-old woman remembers how the oldest neighborhoods of her city used to be.
These are the exciting and saddening, humorous and confusing stories of utterly ordinary people who are living through China's extraordinary transformations. The immense variety in the lives of these Chinese characters dispels any lingering sense that China has a monolithic population or is just a place where dissidents fight Communist Party loyalists and laborers create goods for millionaires.
Chinese Characters is a collection, as Pankaj Mishra writes in his foreword, "to herald a new golden age of journalism about a ceaselessly fascinating country." Contributors include a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a Macarthur Fellow, the China correspondent to a major Indian newspaper, and scholars whose depth of understanding is matched only by the humanity with which they treat their subjects. Their stories together create a multi-faceted portrait of a country in motion and an introduction to some of the best writing on China today.
With contributions from:
Alec Ash
James Carter
Leslie T. Chang
Xujun Eberlein
Harriet Evans
Anna Greenspan
Peter Hessler
Ian Johnson
Ananth Krishnan
Christina Larson
Michelle Dammon Loyalka
James Millward
Evan Osnos
Jeffrey Prescott
Megan Shank